Wes Cecil is another favorite of mine when it comes to introductory philosophy courses. Cecil is a philosophy professor at Peninsula college and focuses on the biography and work of a different philosopher with each lecture. What I especially like about him is the fact that he treats major philosophers from many camps: analytic philosophy (Ludwig Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russell), pragmatism (William James), continental philosophy (Jacques Derrida, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Nietzsche), existentialism (Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beuvoir), and even christian mysticism (Simone Weil). Cecil has a wonderful sense of humor and gives even the most seasoned theorist a new way of explaining the significance of these major philosophers to just about anyone. I thought of including Cecil’s lectures here because of how many times I have quoted his Jacques Derrida lecture in attempting to explain Derrida’s significance to linguistic philosophers. Trust me, these a great.

Buoyed up by that, I decided to start with Nietzsche as I was a little familiar with him.

*Thanks Clicky! Have you got the link to the talk? The review is not wrong…*

“We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it, that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. We know that in secrecy error undetected will flourish and subvert”. - J Robert Oppenheimer.